“It is time to reflect on the future, on the next 50 years when we shall continue to struggle incessantly.

“I’m not trying to scare anyone, this is the truth,” he added.

Let’s be honest about it: the Castros have been preaching this message of struggle and sacrifice in order to keep themselves in power.

Investor’s Business Daily wrote about the economic disaster of 50 Years Of Failure; it’s a litany of disaster after disaster:

1957: Cuban GDP is about $2.8 billion, unadjusted for inflation.

1959: Castro and his guerrillas take over and begin confiscating U.S.-owned private businesses.

1960: President Eisenhower imposes trade embargo, excluding food and medicine; Castro responds by “rapidly nationalizing most U.S. enterprises,” as he himself wrote.

1961: President Kennedy tightens the embargo. Castro blames it for plant shutdowns, parts shortages and 7,000 transportation breakdowns a month, leaving 25% of public buses inoperable. He then targets Cuban companies for expropriation.

1962: Begins food rationing. Half of passenger rail cars go out of service from lack of maintenance.

1963: President Kennedy freezes Cuban assets in the U.S.

1965: Signs deal with USSR to reschedule $500 million in debt.

1966: Signs new deal with Soviets for $91 million in trade credits.

1968: Begins petroleum rationing, says Soviets cut supplies.

1969: Begins sugar rationing in January, announces state plan to produce 10 million tons of sugar by the following year.

1970: Castro announces only 8.5 million tons of sugar produced. Blames U.S. Diverts 85% of all Cuban trade to the USSR.

1973: Tries for the first time to tie wages to productivity.

1974: Ramps up wartime spending to send 3,000 Cuban troops to Africa. It hits $125 per person, highest in Latin America, by 1988.

1975: President Ford announces softening of the embargo, letting foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies sell products in Cuba.

2008: 4.3% GDP growth claimed, far short of 8% forecast. “One of the most difficult years since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” economy minister says. Hurricanes and fuel prices blamed.

That would be bad enough if that was the only story, but the real horror lies in the millions of people whose lives have been destroyed not only in Cuba but in Africa during the war in Angola, and in Latin America.

I’ll be posting on this article on sex tourism in Havana Historia de una jinetera later on. It is describes the sordid life of a woman whose only means of survival in the Revolucion is prostituting herself to tourists.

The elaborate gathering shown live on Cuban television was a stark contrast to a tense calm that hung over the host city earlier in the day, perhaps because shortly after the New Year began, authorities banned Cubans from one of the city’s busiest square.

At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible — also on both sides.

It’s a recurring theme. Israel gave similar warnings to Southern Lebanese villagers before attacking Hezbollah in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Israelis did this knowing it would lose for them the element of surprise and cost the lives of their own soldiers.

That is the asymmetry of means between Hamas and Israel. But there is equal clarity regarding the asymmetry of ends. Israel has but a single objective in Gaza — peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza.

What ensued? This is not ancient history. Did the Palestinians begin building the state that is supposedly their great national aim? No. No roads, no industry, no courts, no civil society at all. The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned. Instead, Gaza’s Iranian-sponsored rulers have devoted all their resources to turning it into a terror base — importing weapons, training terrorists, building tunnels with which to kidnap Israelis on the other side. And of course firing rockets unceasingly.

The grievance? It cannot be occupation, military control or settlers. They were all removed in September 2005. There’s only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel’s very existence.

Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world’s opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire — exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d’etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.

Little Green Footballs has graphics on mortar shelllings and rocket attacks fired into Israel for the past eight years since Hamas took over. Who in the media is showing this information?

Hamas with its serial rocket attacks on Israel interprets all of the above not as an opportunity for prosperity, but as a stage one for the great accomplishment of its generation—the absolute destruction of the Jewish state. Its agenda is clear and unambiguous, and apparently shared by millions of elites in the West itself, without whose support Hamas could not exist. The common theme of Western press coverage is the misery of Gaza, never the misery of Gaza as a product of the garrison-state mentality of Hamas’s radical Islamic vows to wage perennial war against Israel.

In classical and modern Koranic exegeses by seminal, authoritative Islamic theologians (for details, see here) this central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’ ”.

Salah al-Khalidi (fl. late 20th century) makes plain how these motifs of Koranic Jew-hatred are interpreted by Hamas in a manner that is entirely consistent with classical exegeses. Extracts (translated from the original Arabic by Dr. Michael Schub in my The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism) are provided below from Khalidi’s major work Haqa’iq Koraniyya al Qadiyya al-Filastinniya [“Koranic Facts Regarding the Palestinian Issue”] which was first published in 1991 by the Hamas Publishing House ManshūrātFilastin al-Muslima, and translated into Urdu, Hindi, Turkish, Russian,and English (formerly available online at www.assabeel.com) due to its international popularity.

Historian David Littman, Dr. Bostom reminds us,

has waged an heroic personal campaign—in public, at the United Nations Human Rights Commission, since January, 1989—to elucidate key aspects of Hamas’ genocidal ideology, demonstrating unapologetically how this annihilationist hatred is sanctioned by Islam’s foundational text.

Part 2,

Jihad is the other pillar of Hamas’ foundational Jew-annihilationist ideology featured in the 1988 Covenant. Once again, this is already suggested in the opening statement before the preamble which includes the following quote by Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist, and will continue to exist, until Islam abolishes it, as it abolished that which was before it.” Hamas, it should be noted, claims to be a wing of the International Muslim Brotherhood. Article 2 of the Hamas Charter, for example, states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organisation which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times.”

But the body of theHamas Covenant includes unequivocal statements of Hamas’ irredentist commitment to the annihilation of Israel via jihad. Jihad martyrdom is lauded in article 8 “the Hamas slogan,” (in fact borrowed from the 1928 Charter of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood), which states, “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its Constitution; Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” Article 13 makes plain that Hamas’ jihadism is completely incompatible with any meaningful Middle East peace settlement

Please do take the time to read these two posts. It is necessary that we understand what Hamas stands for. The existence of Israel depends on it.

The man on the left holds a sign that reads “WE NEED YOU OSAMA” on his left hand, and on his right hand a photo… of whom?

When the official photo was released on February, AP described it,

In this photo released by Miraflores Press Office, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez salutes during the commemoration of his 1992 coup attempt in Valencia, Venezuela, Monday, Feb. 4, 2008. As an Army lieutenant colonel, Chavez led a coup attempt in 1992 against then-President Carlos Andres Perez. More than 80 civilians and 17 soldiers were killed before troops loyal to Perez quelled the short-lived putsch. (AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office) (AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Nicastro represents Connecticut’s 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. “The media is a vitally important part of America,” he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them. Even some publishers desperate for help are wary of this route.

Providing government support can muddy that mission, said Paul Janensch, a journalism professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and a former reporter and editor.

“You can’t expect a watchdog to bite the hand that feeds it,” he said.

A renowned economist of the past, J.A. Schumpeter, used to refer to progress under capitalism as “creative destruction” – the replacement of businesses that have outlived their usefulness with businesses that carry technological and organizational creativity forward, raising standards of living in the process.

If the government had intervened, we’d be still be listening to music from wax cylinders instead of from iPod Touch.

Last evening I received some great blog news from Nice Deb and the ladies from the Cotillion. The Weblogs Awards had a last-minute opening in their Best Large Blog category, and now I’m in the running! This is a great honor, and a great way to start the year. Thank you to Kevin and to the people who nominated my blog, and especially to all my readers and visitors.